All that is necessary for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing. -- Edmund Burke

Tuesday, October 02, 2007

If you remember the zeal with which the left and their allies in the media repeatedly discussed Tom Delay and the Jack Abramoff scandal--month after month after month; then this article about Hillary's sleazy fundraising by Nicholas Van Hoffman on the website of the left wing magazine The Nation should really hit home:

Hillary escaped political damage from accepting campaign contributions from Norman Hsu, the shadowy businessman who has been accused of bilking investors of $60 million in addition to running afoul of the election laws.

When Hillary Rodham Clinton held an intimate fund-raising event at her Washington home in late March, Layton donated $4,600, the maximum allowed by law, to Mrs. Clinton's presidential campaign.

But the 37-year-old Ms. Layton says she and her husband were reimbursed by her husband's boss for the donations. "It wasn't personal money. It was all corporate money," Mrs. Layton said outside her home here. "I don't even like Hillary. I'm a Republican."

The boss is William Danielczyk, founder of a Washington-area private-equity firm and a major fund-raising "bundler" for Mrs. Clinton. Mrs. Layton's gift was one of more than a dozen donations that night from people with Republican ties or no history of political giving. Mr. Danielczyk and his family, employees and friends donated a total of $120,000 to Mrs. Clinton in the days around the fund-raiser.

If Danielczyk did what the article alleges, he could go to jail. Reimbursing your employees for political contributions made in their names with your money is against the law. Whether Hillary's connection to Danielczyk will eventually bite her is anybody's guess. It is believed in the big-money circles where Hillary lives that the practice is common although done with more subterfuge than in Layton's case.

Both of the Clintons seem to have gone money-crazy. Bill is out loose on the world taking enormous amounts of money from anyone who pays him to appear anywhere and bragging about it. With a pension of $186,000 a year plus innumerable other perks, another ex-President might rein in the itchy palm urge, but Bill is not known as a self-control artist. Whether he is also acting as a bag man for his wife is something for future grand juries to investigate.

Joe Trippi, who devised Howard Dean's financing his campaign via the Internet three years ago, has weighed in on the ethics of Hillary's money-raising. Trippi, presently working for John Edwards, ripped into Hillary for

hosting a fundraiser in Washington, D.C., for a select group of lobbyists with an interest in homeland security.

Tickets for the Clinton fundraiser are $1,000 a ticket and $25,000 per bundler. And for that money you get more than a meal--you get to attend one-hour breakout sessions in four different areas of homeland security that will include House Committee Chairs and members of Congress who sit on the very committees that will be voting on homeland security legislation.

That no one in the Clinton campaign--including the candidate--found anything wrong with holding this fundraiser is an indication of just how bad things have gotten in Washington--because there isn't an American outside of Washington who would not be sickened by it.

Trippi may have underestimated American indifference to graft and corruption, but he is right on the essentials. Much good it will do, for Hillary's fondness for the long green has not hurt her, at least so far. Besides, in politics, the adage goes, there is no such thing as dirty money.

Funny they weren't sporting that "adage" when talking about Abramoff. Still, you should read the whole thing. Because when even hard left publications like The Nation are writing openly about the corruption of the Clintons, you intuitively know that we are not simply dealing with "excess" in this instance; this is most likely sleaze at a level and dirty money in amounts seldom (if ever) seen in the history of the US. Of course that particular publication is not going to put it in exactly those terms--but given the partisanship of the Left and the media in general, the very fact of the story itself is very, very telling.